Tag Archives for " ransomware "

Cryptomining has taken ransomware’s place as the top cybersecurity threat in 2018, according to Webroot’s Mid-Year Threat Report Update. Focusing on trends in the first half of 2018, the report discovered cyberattack vectors becoming increasingly advanced and sophisticated, according to the Tuesday press release for the report.

In an evolving threat landscape, the report revealed that 73% of CISOs companies resigned to data breaches are stockpiling cryptocurrency to pay off ransoms; and the vast majority (79%) of stockpilers have actually paid a ransom.

Security researchers with the internet services company Akamai have noticed something unusual as they’ve responded to a spate of recent DDoS attacks. Buried beneath the traffic deluge designed to grind a target’s web traffic to a halt are ransom notes.

“It’s actually like a DDoS attack with a phishing attack with an extortion attack all rolled into one,” said Chad Seaman, a senior engineer with Akamai’s security intelligence response team, in an interview with Fortune. “When we saw it we were like, huh, clever bastards.”

The OCR’s January 2018 newsletter details specific types of cyber extortion that healthcare organizations are currently encountering, including ransomware, denial of service attacks, distributed denial of service attacks and theft of protected health information (PHI).

A new form of ransomware has emerged which is, unusually, being distributed by two separate exploit kits – one of which was thought to have disappeared – and demands payment in a lesser-known form of cryptocurrency.

There’s a potentially massive new ransomware spreading in Eastern Europe. The malware, dubbed Bad Rabbit, has hit three Russian media outlets, including the news agency Interfax, according to Russian security firm Group-IB. Once it infects a computer, Bad Rabbit displays a message in red letters on a black background, an aesthetic used in the massive NotPetya ransomware outbreak.